


all I want for you, is to be satisfied

by Splatx



Series: Evan, also known as "This is a Bad Idea(TM) [10]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because Our Boy Deserves Better, Character Death Fix, Epilogue, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Slow Burn, They think he's dead but he's NOT, everyone is bi, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26519221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splatx/pseuds/Splatx
Summary: He'd been dying up on that mountain.Had closed his eyes and expected that to be it.And then there'd been hands. A voice.And she'd beenstubborn, wouldn't let him sleep. Wouldn't take no for an answer.Arthur owed her his life.
Relationships: Abigail Roberts Marston/Evan, Abigail Roberts Marston/John Marston, Abigail Roberts Marston/John Marston/Arthur Morgan/Evan, Abigail Roberts Marston/John Marston/Arthur Morgan/Original Female Character, Arthur Morgan/Evan, John Marston/Arthur Morgan, John Marston/Evan
Series: Evan, also known as "This is a Bad Idea(TM) [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1876702
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	1. for just a moment, a yellow sky, if I see it comin', do I run or do I let it be?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [put a flower in your pocket](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25273924) by [mindelan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindelan/pseuds/mindelan). 
  * Inspired by [sunset](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22700830) by [zenexit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenexit/pseuds/zenexit). 



###  _all I want for you, is to be satisfied_  
~Simple Man, Lynyrd Skynyrd

###  _for just a moment, a yellow sky, i_ _f I see it comin', do I run or do I let it be?  
_ ~Hurricane, Lin-Manuel Miranda  
~My Shot, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Anthony Ramos, Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Leslie Odom, Jr. 

The sun shines bright, but Arthur is cold.

He doesn’t hurt anymore, so perhaps there are small mercies. His throat doesn’t rage with its coughs, his throat doesn’t burn with the rot of his lungs.

_there are fingers gentle on his face, fluttering before settling light on his throat_

  
  


Micah had stabbed him in the back.

Literally.

With a knife.

And he’s laying on his back so that should, he supposes, hurt. But, just as his fingers do, the wound buzzes, tingles like his body does when he’s far too drunk and, though he can see blood pooling sluggishly beneath him he can’t find it in him to check the wound.

_those fingers press firmly against his pulse point. hesitate. move to his wrist and press there_

  
  


He can’t look away from the sun.

It’s beautiful as it rises, casting the world in golds and oranges and reds, broad strokes he’d give anything to have the chance to draw. But he’s dying, and a dying man can’t exactly draw.

Besides, he’d given John his journal, so even if he could have he wouldn’t have anywhere to draw it.

John…

‘John… John made it.’ he told Dutch ~~don’t think about Dutch that’s not your Dutch anymore your Dutch _died_ that’s just some man in his body he’s ~~_~~changed~~ _ and god but he hopes that was true, that John had made it safe down the mountain and found a way to Copperhead Landing, that the women had made it there safe.

_a sigh above him - relieved - and his head is taken in her hands, gently shaken_

  
  


He blinks, long and sluggish, trying to imprint on his eyelids the sight of the rising sun as they grow heavier and heavier, as he begins to lose the fight to stay awake. It’s not the setting sun, but it’s just as beautiful, and he thinks he could almost die at peace.

_“Mister?”_ but he doesn’t die. That voice is insistent, those hands shaking him just that bit harsher, _“Mister, can you hear me?”_ and he sees something gold, not the sun, no, but that damnable stag that had been haunting him since Guarma, staring at him and, though it doesn’t speak, stands only silhouetted against the sun, blinks long and slow with depthless brown eyes, he somehow understands it - _‘fight.’_

_“Mister, I can’t carry you, I need your help.”_

  
  


A hand under his back, propping him up painfully, and he can’t help but to groan as agony burns bright hot through his knife-wound - the voice murmurs an apology - and harries him into sitting up, though still he’s sluggish, pained. _“C’mon mister, help me out here. I can’t carry you, you’re gonna need to walk.”_

  
  


Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

_“That’s good, Mister. We’re almost there.”_

Left.

One step at a time.

The stag bounds ahead of them.


	2. when you're broken on the ground, you will be found

###  _when you're broken on the ground, you will be found_  
~You will be found, Ben Platt, Kristolyn Lloyd, Will Roland, Laura Dreyfuss

She’d come so close to riding passed.

Every day, it seemed, her good deed was rescuing some woe-befallen travellers from Raiders or O’Driscolls that were attacking their camp, smoke pluming in the air like a beacon. The smoke had looked too thick to be for a hideout, a secret moonshining business, which was a damn shame because there were a few more cropping up and she was having a bit of trouble tracking them down.

And she wasn’t a good person. Was, probably, worse than those what were robbing the travelers, though she worked alone - after all, you don’t get a nickname that makes folk shiver by being a nice and pious good girl.

But she’d been out robbing and stealing that day and, though heaven was long out of reach for her, why not do a good deed and try to atone for some of her sins? Although it wasn’t entirely selfless - folk tended to pay her well for saving life, limb, liberty and property.

  
  


It was unlike any raided camp she’d found, and unease rolled low in her stomach. Bodies, human and horse both, littered the ground heavier than she’d ever seen, many still burning and _oh_ that’s what that smell was. Tents and wagons lay, crushed and collapsed and burning, and finally she dismounted, leading Merchant forward for fear of being thrown.

_‘Jesus…’_

A woman’s corpse laid, a crater in her chest, and it hit her like a blow to the stomach. It wasn’t the first woman-corpse she’d seen, of course, and she’d seen more than her fair share of women cut down, but most were outlaws, rough and tough folk who knew what they were getting into. Though the corpse was largely burnt, she could make out a fine dress and hair that, at least at one point, seemed to have been pulled up into a rather elegant up-do.

Poor woman.

  
  


They were Pinkertons, she realized with a sudden burst of alarm, kneeling to look one of the uniformed carcasses over. And she should have fled then and there, seeing as she was an outlaw and a quickly becoming infamous one at that, but she’d always been too curious for her own good and so she trusted Merchant to alert her to anyone approaching and followed the trail of carnage into the cave.

And carnage it was.

Though the _number_ of corpses was lesser, the deaths were crueler. The shots seemed wider, less accurate, drag-marks showing where men had dropped and crawled in some desperate attempt at finding somewhere that, somehow, would save them from dying though they had a bullet in their lungs, their heart, their neck.

She shivered, looked up, _“oh,”_ when she realized she recognized where she stood, where the ladder let out.

A smarter woman would have mounted up and fled in the opposite direction.

Evan was not a smart woman.

  
  


She didn’t have to reach the trapdoor to pick up the trail.

Pinkertons littered the ground, and horse-tracks carved the ground deep. Showing common sense for once, she checked her weapons, made sure that only those what were clean and primed and full with ammunition were quick at hand before kicking off to follow, posting in her saddle so as to better see.

Horses littered the sides of the road, walleyed and panicked, shivering and dancing but not fleeing - though their saddles were bloodied, they seemed unharmed, belonging to those folk that were dead on the ground, and so she left them be to be collected by whoever was coming to collect the corpses.

  
  


Evan had always hated to see a horse felled.

Especially a good one, a horse that was hale and healthy and well-tended. So when she came upon the two horses dead in the dirt, her heart broke.

She was a monster, but she was a bleeding heart when it came to animals. Though she didn’t much care for Harriet, they shared that, at the least.

The horses looked like they’d been perfectly fine until they’d been shot down, killed just to get to their masters and, seeing as the only corpses around were those of Pinkertons, they’d been killed in vain. The poor Half-Bred was crumpled, having at least died mid-stride, but the pretty Nokota was dirtied, blood smeared around her, and Evan had always hated Pinkertons but she hated them just that much more at the thought of the poor thing suffering, thrashing on the ground as she died.

But there was nothing she could do besides bury them, and to bury them would take a long time - and the Pinkertons would be coming and she hadn’t the faintest clue how much time she had until then, so she patted the Half-Bred on its white streak and stroked the Nokota’s velvety black nose before trekking up the mountain on foot - Merchant would break a leg just looking at it.

The corpses were far fewer - only six or seven, by her count, though it seemed a mountain lion had had the best night of its life from where pools of blood smeared before ending abruptly.

She’d been following a pair of footprints, and they split off suddenly. It wasn’t much of a decision when they split - follow the prints that went _down_ the mountain, or that scrabbled up, those that went down would be easier to find if the ones that went up proved to be nothing of interest.

_Nothing_ her ass. It was a bit of a scramble, she’d never been too good at climbing, and more than once she almost went back to the other tracks forcibly. How she managed to reach the top, she didn’t know, but by the end she was praying to a god she wasn’t sure she believed in as well as several others, and if she didn’t pride herself in her composure she would have flung herself to the ground and started kissing it.

  
  


The tracks were interesting. Ended abruptly - please, no more climbing, but it wasn’t to be, and it was only that she’d nearly broken her neck climbing _up_ that she didn’t call it, and instead worked at dropping to the ledge below.

And damn, but there’d been a hell of a fight. Blood splatter stained the rock wall black, and the ground was thrown up worse than any town’s horse-path. A bloodied knife lay in the dirt, not far from a revolver, and her hand went down to the holster at her hip in case their owners came back to retrieve them.

  
  


She nearly overlooked him.

If it weren’t for the smear of blood, she would have. The gleam of the drying blood caught her eye not far from the dropped gun, and her hackles rose, turning to follow it and _oh_ there was a corpse, propped up and silhouetted by the sun.

Damn, but she was sick of corpses.

Though something about it held her attention. Maybe because it was a sole corpse instead of a pile of them, or maybe because he was clearly _not_ a Pinkerton, dressed in some sort of brown clothing, but either way the hair on the back of her neck stood on end and, so, drawing her revolver, she began to approaching and

_shit,_ was he breathing?

Her gun never left her hand as she moved to kneel at his side, staring at his chest for a long moment but there was no movement, at least that she could see, and so she reached for his throat, reluctant to set aside her weapon especially considering this man looked _awful_ familiar though he looked a hell of a lot tougher on his wanted poster, but she needed both hands to take her gloves off.

  
  


There was no pulse in his neck.

She took a long moment searching for it, feeling all along the pulse-point, holding her breath as though that would somehow help, but no matter how hard she searched there was nothing to be found.

Evan looked up, and came eye to eye with a stag.

She froze - it was practically touching her, could have reached out and chewed her hair as Penny tended to do, staring her down with eyes so deep she could lose herself in them. It blinked and blew a long, warm breath across her face and though it didn’t say a word she gritted her teeth and looked back at the man.

He looked dead.

But she’d seen a lot of folk what seemed dead but weren’t (though, usually, they ended up dead soon after) and the stag had been very clear in what it wanted, so she reached down to his wrist and pressed two fingers to his pulse point, waited, waited, waited and - 

though she didn’t know the man aside from on wanted posters, she couldn’t help a relieved sigh. He still looked dead, his face gaunt, mouth bloodied, and if that stag came up to her and tried to get her to do compressions in which she had to touch her lips to his she’d say ‘not on your life’ because she was, in the end, a very selfish person and would always value her life over anyone else’s but, especially, some stranger's, and even more so a fellow outlaw's.

So she was careful in the placement of her hands as she reached up to shake his head, “Mister?” she rasped, cringed at the pain in her throat, though she knew his name saying ‘Mister Morgan’ or ‘Arthur Morgan’ over and over again would be a painful mouthful and ‘Arthur’ felt overly familiar. He didn’t respond in any way, though, not even to squeeze his eyes shut, so she shook him again, ‘Mister, can you hear me?’ and that seemed to provoke a response, the skin around his eyes tightening if just a hair, and she thought she caught a flash of golden fur that was gone before she could raise her head.

That seemed to be the best she’d get out of him, which wasn't that great considering he had to have at least a hundred pounds on her and, while she was strong, she wasn't _that_ strong. Even if she were that strong, she’s stupid but not _stupid,_ and certainly not stupid enough to try and haul anything down the mountain.

“Mister, I can’t carry you, I need your help.” even as she said it, she worked on getting him to his feet, slowly wriggling one hand under him to try and prop him up, to goad him to his feet, and it did have the effect in that it caused him pain - he groaned, little more than a rasp, and she apologized, changing her grip to shrug his arm over her shoulder, hoping to get him to stand when she did, “C’mon mister, help me out here. I can’t carry you, you’re gonna need to walk.”

and, thank god, he did. Moaned and groaned and made little sounds of pain with each step, but that stag led the way, steps sure as it helped them down the mountain, showing her the easiest way so as not to jostle him, and never once did they have to climb or scrabble.

Thank god - thank the deer, really - seeing as, even without that, he wilted, until she ended up taking most of his weight.

  
  


Merchant, bless him, was waiting for them. He was clearly unsettled by the two horses laying dead nearby, and she’d fully expected him to have taken off, waiting for her whistle, but when she whistled he raised his head and trotted over, dancing uneasily.

She adores Merchant really, she does. And better him than Sprung or Duchess, but she’d rather she had Tug or Cassim - Merchant’s not the biggest horse, or the sturdiest, and with the man unable to support himself she was concerned about trying to ride with him in front of her. But wish in one hand and shit in the other, so she cajoled the stallion into letting her work the man up into the saddle, having a hell of a time getting him _up_ and keeping him there, before swinging up behind him and reaching around to grab the reins, whirling the Standardbred about and spurring him into a gallop with an abruptness that made him scream.

  
  


The buck bounded alongside them the whole way.


	3. Full of it, debt-ridden

###  _Full of it, debt-ridden_  
~Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom, Jr., Anthony Ramos, Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Phillipa Soo, Christopher Jackson

The horse was rough beneath him and _god,_ but he hurt.

The woman kept apologizing, adjusting her grip on him and rasping loose in his ear, and once he’d asked _“Sadie?”_ because she sounded almost like her but no, it wasn’t, and he’d felt the fool even as he drifted off again.

The ride felt like forever but it couldn’t have been too long before the horse skidded to a stop, throwing him forward into the saddlehorn with a moan. “Sorry,” the woman gasped, dismounting or, at least, he thought so from the sound of boots hitting the ground, all he could see was the buck standing beside him, glowing gold and holding its vigil, and he was fading out again…

_“What the hell are you thinking? That’s Arthur_ Morgan, _you’re going to get us killed!”_

hands on him, pulling him out of the saddle

_“just trust me, I know what I’m doing.”_

his arms were slung over slim shoulders, and he tried to help them, but he felt so _weak_

_“Aunt Maggie…”_

his head bumped something, and he groaned

_“Alright,_ fine! _But only until he ain’t dyin’, then he’s your problem. Lem, put him in your room.”_

the stag sighed, watching as they carried Arthur inside, before looking over at the horse and beginning to graze. Well, they’d saved his boy, the least he could do was make sure her horse didn’t run off.

  
  


In all honesty, Evan was _furious_ with Maggie.

She wasn’t much one for holding grudges. If someone angered her, they usually ended up shot. But this was _Maggie,_ someone she usually dared to call a friend (which, she was starting to realize, she had many more than she’d thought), and goddamn if Maggie didn’t owe her a _hell_ of a lot. She didn’t regret any of it, would do it all over again - but Maggie owed her everything. Owed her Lem’s life, owed her Marcel’s life. Owed her their operation, their shack. All the supplies, the mashes, the decorations, the band. She’d brought her peace when it came to Danny-Lee, had killed the man what was out to kill her, who had crippled her.

But she’d tried to turn her away. The one favor she’d asked of her, Maggie had tried to say _no._ And dared to look _surprised_ when she stood up and said _actually, yes._ And even more so when Lem said _Aunt Maggie, yes._

Maggie, though, really had stepped up. Though she kept glowering at her, Evan returning in kind, she didn’t stop, kept bandaging the man’s wounds, kept applying pastes and medicines (and though she could well afford them she couldn’t help but to cringe at the thought of the cost, knew she’d have to pick up some work to replace them), she and Lem helping. The man was moaning and groaning, gasping in pain as they manipulated him, shifting him around so Maggie could better access his wounds, but she’d seen men perish to infection from wounds much lesser than these and so, though she strained her voice to apologize, she considered it well worth it.

  
  


The man had been stabbed.

His face beaten in, half-starved, with a stab-wound in his back. Christ, the fact he’d made it off the mountain was a damn miracle and she feared he wouldn’t see morning.

  
  


“You’re going to bring Pinkertons down on us!” Maggie hissed at her once the man was practically mummified, two or three wounds discovered for each one they tended, slinking out and closing the door behind them.

Her throat was _screaming,_ burning from speaking so much, but adrenaline raged through her and, though she knew Maggie had a point, she was sick to death of being a push over, of feeding in and getting so little out. “I’ll be gone with him by sun-up then! There ain’t gonna be any Pinkertons sniffing around, anyways, they’re all shot up on that mountain, Margaret,” and maybe Maggie was starting to realize _oh, I fucked up,_ because she flinched back, nostrils flaring in something that might have been shock or might have been indignation, “they’re gonna be busy collecting their corpses.”

Maggie opened her mouth, went to respond but Evan wasn’t up to hear it, turned to Lem who stood off to the side, watching them like some sort of horrible ball game, and barked “Lem, watch him. I have to get a wagon.”

He nodded rapidly, alarmed - he’d seen her shoot down entire legions of revenue agents, an entire train of them once upon a time, but never had he seen her lose her temper like this before - and scurried to what had once been his room but had been turned into the man’s sick room.

  
  


“Evan-” but Evan brushed passed Maggie, offering Marcel only an incline of her head as she strode outside, finding the stag gone, Merchant dozing though he were soaked with blood and, she knew, she was surely no better.

All the better, then, that Cripps had set up camp not far from the moonshine shack - she _didn’t_ know if the Pinkertons were holed up licking their wounds; for all she knew they could have been riding the roads, and a young woman riding a horse, both covered in blood, would definitely have caught their eye.

And, though she wasn’t one of the folk they’d be looking for, they’d be just as happy to catch her. She was no Van Der Linde, but the She-Wolf of the West was a welcome consolation prize.


	4. Chapter 4

###  _The fact that you’re alive is a miracle_  
~That Would Be Enough, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phillipa Soo

Cripps thought she was crazy, too.

And well, Evan would whole-heartedly agree. Arthur goddamn Morgan, lying sick in their camp? Coughing and gasping for breath, having to be tended to like some fading maiden? Wounded and beaten down by some unknown enemy? All while Pinkertons were out in scores - and she would be a well-prized catch?

Goddamn, but if that wasn’t stupid.

  
  


But every time she started to doubt herself, the stag was there. Gleaming gold in the dark, looking at her with those rich brown eyes. It had kept pace alongside the wagon the whole way from the shack to Heartland Overflow, had stood by as she bullied Cripps into helping her move him onto her cot, as he was far too heavy for her to move alone - well, she _could_ have, but he was in far too fragile a condition to be slung over her shoulder like she would a bounty.

And he was _furious,_ was giving her one hell of a silent treatment. Which was rather nice, honestly, considering that otherwise he’d probably be whining about his back. So she counted herself lucky, thought it a bit of a miracle, really, and went to work making sure none of his bandages had been disturbed in the move.

The stag vanished.

  
  


The next morning, she harassed Cripps into helping her manipulate him so she could check his wounds. She’d never been one for medical care - in fact, her knowledge of it largely went ‘drink medicine, plug wound, ??, don’t die’ - but Maggie had told her what to look for and she didn’t see it, so the wounds were dabbed with medicine and re-wrapped. But they were almost out of the medicine they needed, some odd sort of paste, so she tasked Cripps with watching the man and set out for Valentine.

The place was as thick with Pinkertons as Van Horn was with rats. She ducked her head, changed into a dress she always brought with her just in case - oh, but she _despised_ dresses - and kept her head down.

Evan was a notorious outlaw, but she knew how to play the game. Valentine was her home, it was where she bought and sold supplies, where she went when she needed tending or just to sleep for a night with a roof over her head and a bath to soak in. So she’d worked to build up a rapport, protected the place from other outlaws, took up as much work in the town as was feasible, did whatever she could to earn their favor.

And she had - had done it well. She couldn’t help the warmth that bloomed in her chest when she found them actively throwing the Pinkertons off her trail, shaking their heads and ‘oh no, not at all! We don’t get that sort ‘round here.’ and when Old Tom threw her a sour look as she stepped into the General Store, not having realized a Pinkerton was in there as well, the cashier dropped his hand to his waist in an obvious warning to the sour-faced bastard and called out “How do you do Miss Anna?”

She got what she needed with little fuss, even got a few “Good day, Miss”- and “How do you do”-’s from the Pinkertons, found even the instruction pamphlet to make the paste to put on the poor man’s wounds, found she had all the ingredients, that it only needed to be crushed in her mortar and pestle, and hurried back, not wanting to try her luck - one of the younger Pinkertons had hesitated in his “Ma’am,” eyeing her make-upped cheek.

  
  


One of the man’s wounds was infected.

The stag was pacing, throwing its head this way and that and, as his fever rose, she finally broke, dared to ride into town on the ninth day. It wasn’t one of his worst wounds, not more than a deep gash in his arm, but it was starting to look something nasty and she’d seen men die to a lot less than an infected nick in their arm.

The doctor was not particularly happy to be bullied onto the back of her horse - was _far_ less happy to discover his patient was _Arthur fucking Morgan_ \- but she’d spent enough at his clinic to put his daughter into finishing school when she came of age for it, so he shut his mouth and set to work looking over his wounds.

By the time he was done, Morgan was missing a decent chunk of flesh, Cripps had fled for Valentine, and even Evan, who had a relatively strong stomach, was feeling nauseous. She would’ve tapped out, but the stag’s stare had locked her in place, and so she’d stepped in to help out the doctor - she had, however, glared the stag down as she paid the doctor and, then, passed him a decent bit more for his discretion.

That was her money. Her _hard-earned_ money.

Some of it was even legally earned.

But she was no fool. The stag was clearly something otherworldly, and she knew better than to cross something like that. She was no holy woman, was in no way religious, but that stag was something else, and nothing good would come of upsetting it.

  
  


She didn’t dare task Cripps with watching Morgan. While she knew he knew better than to sabotage anything - and besides, he was too damn lazy for that and she liked to think he had some sort of morals - he was _filthy_ and the doctor had made a point to emphasize the need for cleanliness. But she _desperately_ needed to go hunting, so she took to sitting as far from camp as she dared, shooting the deer that came to drink from the Overflow and the geese that flew overhead.

There were many things she didn’t like about Cripps, but his choice in camps was top-notch. And he was quick in breaking down the carcasses, though she had to make the stew, carefully tipping it down the man’s throat.

What Cripps would usually make would surely poison him.

Hell, it would probably poison _her._ Would explain a hell of a lot.

  
  


He woke lucid on the fourteenth day with a strangled gasp, staring at her in alarm and grasping her arm hard enough to bruise. “Where the hell am I?” he demanded, baring his teeth and it would have been intimidating if she hadn’t been caring for his unconscious body for over two weeks. His eyes, still hazy, darted over her face and his own darkened even further, flushed with fever and glistening with sweat, “Who the hell are you?”

“Let me go,” she barked, bringing her hand up and digging a finger into one of the scratches on his arm - barely more than a bruise at this point - the pain startling him enough that he loosened his grip, “and I’ll tell you.”


	5. Head full of fantasies of dyin' like a martyr

###  _Head full of fantasies of dyin' like a martyr?_  
~Right Hand Man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Christopher Jackson, Leslie Odom, Jr.,

The woman’d saved his life.

He couldn’t understand why, and goddammit she should have left him on the mountain. He’d done good - or, at least, good enough. Redeemed himself, been facing the rising sun.

But she’d dragged him down, and now he was in _so much pain._

  
  


The stag - that _damn_ stag, the one he’d been seeing since before Guarma - glowed behind her, and he thought, perhaps, it was part of the reason she’d done it.

She, after all, was a stranger to him, and he to her. Yet she’d risked her neck to haul him halfway across the state, used enough medicine to tend a small town to save his life.

He’d asked her _‘why’_ and she’d hesitated, looked over her shoulder and, he’d swear, met the stag’s gaze, before shrugging, “‘was the right thing t’ do.”

“Should’ve let me die,” he’d told her in return, and said nothing else.

  
  


“You need t’ eat.” she’d tried to push a bowl of stew into his hands, but he shook like a leaf and his hands rattled with weakness, and he had no appetite besides. She’d taken it away, then brought it back a few hours later, then a fresh bowl the next day.

The third day, his stomach was grumbling, but still he turned the food away, closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Maybe, if he slept long enough, he’d never wake up.

When he turned her away, she scooped up a spoonful of the stew, and pressed it against his lips. For one of the first times, he opened his eyes to glare at her - _really?_ \- before turning his head away.

She growled, and ground the heel of her palm into one of his lesser wounds. He shouted, before gagging on the spoon.

The woman, damn her to hell, wasn’t bluffing, so finally he forced himself to sit up as much as he could and eat as many bites as he could stomach. It wasn’t much, but the woman looked at him, nodded, and didn’t hurt him - or even threaten him - further, only took up the bowl and gave him a new glass of water before bidding him to rest.

  
  


The next morning, she gave him another bowl. And he ate a bit more, and sitting up was a bit easier.

And the next morning, even more so.

And then the next, and the next.

And he still hurt, but then one morning he woke up and realized he felt good enough to feel _bored._ He had nothing to do, nothing to look at aside from the canvas walls of the tent, not even his journal to draw in, that had been in the satchel he’d given to John seeing as he hadn’t thought he’d see morning (shouldn’t have, dammit, but he refused to think of that because it hurt in a whole different way), and the tent was bare aside from his cot and… well, that was it, actually.

He asked for a book and, for the first time, the woman smiled.

She smiled even more when she handed over _The Castle Above the Moor: A Romance of Olde England_ by _Mrs. Hescott Childers,_ though whether she found mirth in the book she was giving him or if he pulled a face, he wasn’t sure.

  
  


Some week or so later, after he’d grown sick of the stag’s frustrated staring and had read as much of the book as he could stomach, he finally spoke up as the woman wrapped a bandage around one of his wounds which, if you asked him, was quite done with needing to be wrapped. But when he’d told her so she’d pressed her thumb against it, and he’d yelped, and she’d looked at him as though to say _‘you were saying?’_ and so he’d held his tongue.

“You said you’d tell me your name.”

And she hadn’t so much as paused as she raised her head to look at him,

“When I first woke up, you said you’d tell me who you were.” he flinched as she pulled the bandage tight, tugging at the scab, “but you never did.”

The woman _hmm’d,_ checking the bandage, “Didn’t I?” and he couldn’t quite say if she hadn’t, thinking on it, his memory of that day and a few days after _was_ rather spotty.

“No.” he bluffed, “you didn’t.”

And whether she truly hadn’t or if she just found his bluff amusing, she nodded, “Okay then, I’m Evan. Who’re you?”

Evan… Evan… that sounded familiar, though he couldn’t place it. He remembered Dutch saying it once upon a time (don’tthinkaboutDutch) and was fairly sure he’d heard Hosea say it once or twice ( _God_ Hosea don’tthinkaboutHosea) but he’d had a lot more on his mind.

That the woman didn’t recognize him, though, he didn’t believe for a second. He may not have looked the same, may have been skinner, scrawnier, sicklier, but his face was plastered on bounty posters from Ambarino down to New Austin. Surely, she was just waiting for a confirmation so she could turn him into the Pinkertons?

But… but she _had_ tended him for… well, he wasn’t sure how long. Had tipped medicines down his throat and wrapped his wounds over and over, put up with his fussing and given him back just as good as he gave, and sure his bounty was Dead or Alive but surely the extra money for _Alive_ wasn’t worth the fuss?

“Arthur,” he finally conceded, “Name’s Arthur Morgan,” and that was enough, he burst into a fit of coughs that she drew back from, though as she did so she extended another handkerchief to him (she’d given him more than one, but the rest had been burned, it hadn’t escaped her the coughs that rattled in his lungs, the blood that leaked from the corner of his mouth, the low fever and chills and night sweats that wouldn’t go away no matter how much medicine she convinced him to drink.

She was tending him, sure, but there was a line she was willing to draw and if he got her sick she would find a way to kill that stag come hell itself, and she didn’t care if it was some supernatural thing, everything dies somehow.

“Well met, Mr. Morgan,” she raised her voice over his muffled coughing, slipping out to retrieve a glass of water, returning Mr. Cripps’ glare ( _‘Oh go bother someone else you sour faced bastard!’_ ) before passing it to Arthur, who had slumped down to the cot, his regained strength waning.

That night, he remembered seeing her face on bounty posters, and choked on his water.


End file.
